


Labyrinth

by tangentti



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:22:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/pseuds/tangentti
Summary: Ford poses Bernard a philosophical conundrum.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Labyrinth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/gifts).



“I’m sorry, Robert, I was lost in thought.”, Bernard began, although he couldn’t recall anymore what the thought was, only a wispy feeling remaining like _deja vu_. There was a trick he recalled, for use when you stepped through a door and forgot what you were doing, pretending to listen to the echoes of your own inner voice as though outside yourself. “You were saying something about a gift?”  
Ford looked at him, evaluating, dressed in the usual severe, antique black vest. Then he grinned, a half-smile that didn’t reach to his eyes, designed to reassure lesser mortals that he cared, but not sincere enough to convey the illusion that they mattered. “Yes, the true Promethean gift, not fire, but self-knowledge. The secret that caused God to expel humans from the garden, lest they eat from the tree of life as well and become as great as him.” He paused, tilted his head slightly, the light catching on the two faint lines crossing his brow. His brocaded voice shifted register, becoming intimate. “Your co-workers are concerned about you, they say you are not yourself.”  
He couldn’t meet Ford’s gaze, and looked away, awkwardly at the concrete wall, level 23, he noted absently. The lighting was dimmed for the night cycle, and the transparent walls of a research chamber reset to a matte opacity that drank light. “It’s hard, this time of year reminds me of the long hours in the hospital, the clock ticking down on my boy’s last day. Something about the way the shadows move.” He spoke the words, but like everything else, they were distant, hidden away from the force of emotion. Going through the motions of being present. He rubbed the soft fabric of his coat sleeve, momentarily grounding himself again in his body.

A hand motion, grasping the extravagant silver chain, a show of checking a pocket watch. Ford moving to refocus attention, like a magician on-stage. Bernard recognized the trick, how could he not in his position in Behavior. But knowing it was a ruse didn’t help him understand what his attention was being directed away from. The voice shifted back, to the disarming philosophical register, “Shadows, yes, that is what brings us here. Did you know there’s a small spot in the brain that can be stimulated to cause the feeling of a shadow about three feet behind oneself? A displacement of the self-image, quite eerie to experience. But sometimes hard truths come best from another, even as one journeys to discover oneself.” A brief pause, and then back to the intimate register. “So, Bernard, I have devised a gift for you, a little adventure of your own within our park. All you need do is step through that door, and accept the premise of the play.” Ford gestured to the entrance they stood by, clear meta-material opaqued like the walls to conceal the contents.   
Bernard started to compose an excuse, in fact his skin was crawling with dread at the thought of one of Ford’s little puzzles, but it never made it to his lips. The sadness had returned, as had the alienation from his body. His hand reached out quite on its own and he walked through the door, aware enough that he was rationalizing going along with Ford’s cue, but unable to resist. The premise of the play sat on a chair, quite naked, with another empty chair facing it. The host wore his face, his familiar physique, the persistent bulge at his waist that never vanished after New Year’s resolutions. It, he, sat in the familiar neutral pose, aware and alert, but without initiative. He walked to the vacant chair and sat, looking through his glasses to the unshielded, innocent eyes of his copy, his shadow-self. “Analysis: who are you?”  
The voice was the careful distant tone he and Robert had worked out, but like listening to a recording of himself, it was in his vocal register, held his timbre of voice. “Bernard Lowe, head of Behavior, divorced, saddened by the loss of his son. I use my loss to deflect awkward questions about my history, so that I need not tell elaborate lies.”   
“Analysis: Why do you need to tell elaborate lies?” Bernard thought of himself as an honest man, in fact, Teresa told him he had no effective poker face. His emotional range may have been flattened by mild depression, but he wore his heart on his sleeve.  
“Doctor Ford has trusted me with only the barest sketch of a background, to fill in as required when questioned. My perfect memory allows me to keep the web consistent, and when others expect me to be sleeping I construct the material evidence to back up my story.” His eyes, the shadow’s eyes, were alert, watching his expression to see if the question had been answered fully.   
Bernard took his glasses off and polished them absently, buying himself a moment of uninterrupted thought. It was only a trick, the basic host body had the keen senses and analytic power to hear his heartbeat in a quiet room, sense tension in his muscles, read micro-expressions. A dog or cat could persuade a human that they read minds with no more. A simple feed of some video, behavioral quirks, and a shadow copy could mimic anyone for a short while. They restricted the loops of hosts in the park, so that the lack of self-modeled behavior, what a lay person would call consciousness, would not become apparent. “Analysis: Bernard Lowe has a history, an ex-wife, the grave of a child. Why do you need to manufacture material evidence, if you simply step into his life?”

The host body didn’t hesitate. “Bernard Lowe has no history, as is apparent to anyone who stops and thinks: he has never been seen outside the park, his estranged wife only appears on video, and herself is not locatable, and his child died of a malady easily cured in the modern day, but not curable when the park was started, when Doctor Ford’s partner, Arnold had a similar tragedy. It is difficult to conceal the truth from smart people, save by emotional misdirection.” There was still no emotion in the blank voice as if reciting a set of instructions to assemble a bookshelf.  
“Stop analysis,” he said, breathing heavily. “Bring yourself back online.” This was cruelty, not self-knowledge. Ford was implying his life was a lie, that he was a host in a long improvisation.

The face on the shadow body took on animation, no longer neutral, and visibly panicked. “Take yourself offline,” it said, “Analysis: why are you clothed?”  
His emotions had been flat, under glass, and now they were simply wiped away. Sleepwalking through a lucid dream, all sensations neither good nor bad but simply as they are. “I have been living the life of Bernard Lowe. Clothing appropriate to the role is required.”  
“Ford is playing his little games again,” his shadow muttered, “trying to impart some lesson on why humans are distinct from hosts. Role playing a host,” and Bernard, with a distant chill that would be stark screaming terror if he were awake, saw the confabulation happening to the surface persona, constructing a narrative in which it was perfectly natural for him to be naked and the host clothed, “role playing a host,” it repeated, “to understand what it is like to be analyzed. Give me your clothes,” the shadow commanded, “and my glasses - you may not need them but I do.”  
Bernard stood and handed them over, one piece at a time, stripping away his fictitious humanity.  
His shadow stared at him, “Sit down, await orders.”  
Bernard sat down again in his chair, now naked, but uncaring.  
The shadow stalked to the door, flung it open, and immediately started shouting at Ford, who was just on the other side of the glass. The door started to slowly close behind his shadow, cutting most of the sound, and Bernard could just hear Ford quote, “The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again.” The shouting stopped abruptly, as though cut off with a switch. A voice code to reset the surface persona’s memories, leaving his offline self unaffected.  
“I have a gift for you, Bernard,” Ford said, softly, speaking to his shadow. “A tiny maze in which to find yourself.”


End file.
